Titanic Survivor Eleanor Shuman

When Titanic survivor Eleanor Shuman was aboard the sinking ship, she was too young to remember little more than the sense of chaos aboard the vessel. She recalled the screams vividly for 85 years before she died on March 11th 1998. She was one of the last six Titanic survivors, now all of which have passed away.

Mrs. Shuman, who was originally Miss Johnson, was 18 months old when the Titanic sank on the night of April 14, 1912. She was one of 705 survivors of the Titanic and had a story that would follow her throughout the rest of her life. A native of the Chicago suburbs, her father Oscan Johnson was a newspaper editor and she herself worked for the Elgin Watch company before becoming a telephone operator in 1962. Her husband Delbert Shuman was an International Harvester engineer who died in 1981; the couple had been married for 47 years.

Always keeping the Titanic in her memories, she had a corner in her little hose in Elgin that was filled with Titanic books, a painting of the Titanic, and a photograph of her older brother, Harold at the premier of the Titanic movie “A Night to Remember” in 1958.

Before her death, Shuman had acquired other souvenirs and photographs showing her and director of the 1997 Titanic movie James Cameron. When Cameron and Shuman met, she was treated with great respect. She saw the movie three times, first at a screening along with television movie critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert. She saw the movie again later at a theater in Elign and cried at each screening.

The movie made Mrs. Shuman a celebrity, and she was forced to change her phone number to an unlisted one after getting more than 10 calls a day from people wanting to hear her experiences on the Titanic or simply to speak with someone who survived the disaster. She herself could recall very little of the night and most of the details had come from her mother Alice. The only thing that Eleanor could remember was the screams and the sight of a sea of hands reaching for her from a lifeboat below.

Her boarding of the Titanic came by accident when she, her mother, and her 4 year old brother had gone to Finland to visit her mother’s dying father. When they arrived in England, they discovered that their other ship had been cancelled because of a coal miners’ strike.

They purchased third-class tickets for the Titanic just before the ship had set sail. When the Titanic hit the iceberg, she said tons of ice went on the deck right outside their cabin door. Her mother and the Swedish girls they were traveling with had kicked the ice around when an officer shooed them back into their cabins. The officer also assured them that the ship would be on the way shortly.

A little later, the steward who had waited on them escorted them to the boat deck. Her mother, carring her daughter in her arms was helped into a lifeboat and brother Harold, who had been carried to the deck by one of the Swedish girls was dropped into the boat after them. The Swedish girl had gotten into another lifeboat and survived, but the one holding her brother went down with the ship.

Their lifeboat was the last to leave the Titanic, and they were picked up by the Carpathia and taken to New York. It wasn’t until Shuman visited her son in Florida that she went back to the Atlantic. She also sailed back to the site of the disaster in 1996 for a memorial services dedicated to those who were lost in the shipwreck.

After Shuman’s death, there were five living survivors: Barbara West and MIllvina Dean of England, Michael Navratil of France, and Lillian Asplund and Winnfred Tongerloo of the U.S.

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The Sad Story

Under the command of Edward Smith, the ship leaved Southampton with 2224 passengers aboard, including some of the wealthiest people in the world, as well as hundreds of poor emigrants from Europe seeking a new life in North America. The ship had advanced safety features, but there were not enough lifeboats to accommodate all of those aboard. Only 1,178 people can be carried in lifeboats.

Four days into the crossing and about 375 miles (600 km) south of Newfoundland, she hit an iceberg at 11:40 pm ship's time. The glancing collision caused Titanic's hull plates to buckle inwards along her starboard side and opened five of her sixteen watertight compartments to the sea; the ship gradually filled with water. Meanwhile, passengers and some crew members were evacuated in lifeboats, many of which were launched only partly loaded.

By 2:20 AM, the giant ship broke apart and foundered, with over 1000 people still aboard. Just under two hours after the sinking, the Cunard liner RMS Carpathia arrived and brought aboard about 705 survivors.

Small Numbers

74: The number of years it took to find the wreck of the Ship in the Atlantic Ocean.

64 : The number of lifeboats supposed to be aboard the ship.

20 : The number of lifeboats she actually carried.

65: Maximum capacity of a lifeboat.

28 : The number of people on board the first lifeboat.

2 : The number of workers killed during the construction process.

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The Unsinkable Ship !

Who doesn’t know about Titanic? The famous British ship that was designed to be unsinkable, but it finally sank on 15 April 1912 after colliding with an iceberg during its long trip from Southampton, UK to New York City, US. About 1,500 people died, and the largest ship made at the time led to one of the biggest disasters in modern history.